I am floating like a cork on the salty Dead Sea, 1,400 feet below sea level, thinking about mud and history.
Earlier, at the spa in the Hotel Dan, I was slathered in mineral-rich ooze said to be a remedy for arthritis, skin ailments and even wrinkles. Not the usual pampering of a spa, but rather a return to something primeval.
Now, in the hazy distance across the pale blue/green sea, I can see the shores of Jordan; above is the mysterious stony desert, with its whispers of history. Nearby are the caves of Qumran, where the Dead Sea scrolls lay curled in jars for 2,000 years, preserved by the dry desert air I breathe today.
Could this place have looked much different two millennia ago? Around the hilltop caves there is no Dead Sea souvenir shop, no falafel stand. There is an archeological site with a visitors centre where a pottery-making compound was found dating to 1200 BC. But, according to a 10-year Israeli excavation, the authors of the scrolls were not the inhabitants of this site but refugees who hid the documents haphazardly in various caves as they were fleeing the Romans.
As for the caves themselves, with their aperture-like slits, getting to them in this rocky landscape would be daunting. It took a young Bedouin goat herder, who in l947 idly threw a stone into a cave and heard it hit a vase, to open the way to what has been called the most important archeological discovery of the 20th century.
The scrolls are the earliest version of the Hebrew Bible ever found. Written on papyrus and parchment and even on copper, these 900 documents, many pieced together from scraps, date from the third century BC to the first century AD, which makes them more than 1,000 years older than any previously known copies of the Hebrew Bible.
There are also non-biblical scrolls – commentaries and descriptions of daily rituals. The War Scroll and others predict a good-versus-evil struggle that sounds a lot like the beliefs of today's End of Days Christian fundamentalists.
“What kind of thinking was in the air – why did these powerful themes of the apocalypse and the messiah come forward,” muses Toronto archeologist Dan Rahimi, vice-president of gallery development for the Royal Ontario Museum. The answer is not clear, and the scrolls are still being studied.
The desert, of course, is where the three monotheistic religions were born. I explore this sun-baked terrain by riding in a rattling Jeep from Hotel Dan to the top of the monochromatic landscape. Standing on top of a tan-coloured hill, long-haired Gil Shkedi, who runs Desert Tours (shkedig.com), points out a glittering substance veined in some of the rocks. Salt, he says. It was one of the most valuable commodities of ancient times, and the Dead Sea was a trade route.
Masada
Looking down from the hills, it's easy to imagine this area as a hideaway and a fortress. It's not far from the most famous fortress in Israel, Masada, where Jewish Zealots resisted the Romans from 66 to 73 AD, choosing to kill each other rather than surrender.
The area was first excavated in 1963, and the work has continued. Today, instead of walking up the snake path, as it's called, visitors can take a cable car. Many of the rooms in what was originally a Roman site, complete with palaces and baths, have been uncovered and offer tantalizing hints of their past. For those who want things rendered visually, there is a museum at the entrance, opened in 2007, with dioramas and dark sculptures of Romans and Jews engaged in daily life.
